So, a few years back I bought a used Airport Extreme which has never given me problems until now. Anyway, my iMac had been slowing down considerably so I decided to reinstall Snow Leopard for the first time (I was one of those who skipped Leopard, the first time I skipped one of the cats now to think of it). My iMac seems to being humming right along now that I have reinstalled, except my Airport pooped out. Using Airport Utility, it tells me it is hooked up to the internet and I get a strong signal but nothing happens, no email and no surfing. I figured it was something that was screwed up when I uploaded, or settings I had forgotten about. All to no avail.

And, here is the strange part, my wife's cheap little windows laptop also says the same thing: it's connected to the Airport, strong signal, but when you actually try to use the internet you get nada. How could reinstalling SL do this to the airport? Admittedly, I have done a lot of screwing around, reset the aiport, changed setting, reverted settings, etc, but I remember when I first hooked up the airport it was a no-brainer, it pretty much just worked when I hooked it up. Is that how you know an Airport Extreme is going bad; it shows a signal and says it's hooked up but gives you no internet?

Did you do a full factory reset? If the problem is still there it's gone bad. I have seen that happen with routers and Airports, all looks good but you can't get anywhere.

Can you connect directly to the modem with a cable okay? Have you reset your modem? Make sure you reboot the modem after plugging the cable in so it associates with the computer. Some modems only hand out one IP per ethernet port so you have to reset them when connecting them to a different port.

Listen to Reboot, do a full hard reset. Hold the reset button in for a full ten seconds, not just one. (One second will do just a soft reset.)

A much more rare problem but it has happened to me. That RJ45 cable from your modem to the airport extreme can flake out. Since the airport signal is good swap the cable out with a new one. I've had one go bad just looking at it.

And last but not least, did you pay your bill? Comcast cuts internet and not cable when the bill is overdue. You get them on the phone and pay by credit card it is back up in minutes. I have done this a couple times since I have two comcast bills and when I moved them to autopay they keep screwing it up. (I still don't have them on autopay.) You tell them something like that and they never tag you for a "hookup service fee".

Come to think of it, that's a third humongous company that I have always had the best service with. Comcast phone service people are the best. Right up there with BOA and Chase.

Thanks for the feedback guys. I do have internet if I put the ethernet cable right into the back of my computer. I had reset several times, but did not make sure it was more than 10 sec's to ensure it was a hard reset. I reconfigured, but still no dice.

It's okay, I'll go buy another used one tomorrow, as I have another errand near the storied Akihabara. I don't really want or need one that badly, but gotta keep the wife happy.

Probably the Extreme. The only other thing I can think of is if you've all of a sudden had some interference, 2.4 or 5Ghz phones, alarm systems, and microwaves are the biggies. A close by router. Have you tried going into the wireless config and changing the radio mode. If you hold down the Option key before clicking on the radio mode menu you get a bunch more choices. Choose n only all the way on the bottom if you only have n. If you click Wireless Options you can choose Interference Robustness.

Probably not that but If the population density is high, apartments etc, it's worth playing with.

Probably. I know I'd heard that older chipsets would routinely drop the connection, and in practice that seems to bear out. My connections were all 802G routers, and hard rebooting was a pretty regular thing (along with lease renewals, usually after a new node would auto-grab one, on the private/internal side); but since 300Mbps N 100 percent uptime (well, stuff flakes out, too - weird stuff, too - Google DNS (in the routers) never has died, so that part of the connection is good, but from DNS resolution to the rest of the world, the network breaks - Go figure - Gotta be Google, the IP addy part of either the resolution or the actual TCP/IP pathway/the_web (no clue - is DNS t-boned, so traffic hoseage is an ISP network FUBAR?) gets honked up - The few times it's happened, though, it goes away after an inconvenient spell of time). No clue, though - Mystifying stuff. Hella lot more reliable and quicker than out-of-the-box/ISP/whatever DNS.

Oh, and there's some obsure/arcane DNS caching or something in Leopard that can (very rarely, hardly ever, only once in my experience) flake out and you don't know where it is or how to fix it. Pretty reliable, really, but I had one Leopard computer going yeoman-great for ages, but then one day couldn't hack DNS resolution and just churn and churn, nothing, showstopper. And it's not the CLI blow-away, either - That didn't work. Something else. Showstopper - Couldn't get past resolving, no matter what: Hard resets, changing DNS in the router, etc - Nothing worked. Blowing away Leopard and installing Snow Leopard brought stuff back to normal. Internet - Yippee - There's some funky-arsed file in Leopard that's 99.999 percent on the money, but when it flakes, it flakes.

Or, the DNS cache file just decides to not clear/re-cache on new input, whatever - No clue - Couldn't fix whatever it was without blowng away the OS, however, and that's the only time I've ever had a problem on any computer since Tiger (and with Tiger, the only problem was an ugly forced hard-reboot on account of a 'wake from sleep' problem if BT wasn't turned off on laptops, but got fixed with 10.4.11 IIRC - Other than that, Mac has been sweet 24/7/365. That's the only reason I like these overpriced POSes - They're worth it

Well, I guess you're right about your beefs, for I share em, too. You pay a high price for Apple, but it's worth it for the most part, despite the stifling, protecting turf, financial-delineation to discrete segments, heavy-handedness, closedness/non-openness/proprietaryness, etc, it's mostly worth the admission price when you consider the alternatives.

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